I added a little trainer script in the very first recharge room. It will constantly spawn Energy, Speed, and Power upgrades so you can mess around with the new functionality.
Suggestion: Just add a room somewhere like this, and tell us which DMap/Room it is, and we can cheat/warp to it to test out the Sidearm changes:

Then you can remove the spawning items from the first recharge room - and you can then completely forget about this added room. It won't be accessible without cheating, and thus won't be accessible in the final release (nor in the demo, to anyone who isn't bothering to follow this thread.) If the Sidearm will max out at 25 for each upgrade, you only need 24 of each in the room to completely power it up. And this makes it much easier and faster for us to pick out
exactly how many of each we want to add to test it out... All we have to do is remember to warp in from the 8th-11th rows so we don't land on the powerups immediately. Have the door warp us back to the starting point in Aquarius.
I was actually going to suggest scaling the Zodiac weapons based on your blaster stats. It'll make it so most of them can at least stay relevant. Except the Aquarius one, I can't see that one being useful ever. Unless there is some enemy with a shield it can go around. But then it's only limited in usefulness. Some of them do need to move faster as is. I'm looking at you, uh, I think it's the Pisces 3-way, it's not labeled anywhere I can see.
It's labeled "Pisces Spread" in the inventory, but many of the inventory names do not match what he's listed in the OP... like the "Taurus Flame" vs. "Taurus Torch". The Pisces weapon is the only one he didn't mention in the OP. Hence why I referred to it as the "Pisces
Something" - because I'm a sarcastic asshole.
I actually think that the blaster should have a consistent speed throughout the game. Something close to what lvl 2 speed is now. I think that instead of speed it should be special and give things like pierce, spread, etc. every 5 levels. Just have somewhere what it gets at each level.
I mostly agree - mostly what bugs me is that you can outpace your Lvl1 bullets, and after several upgrades, the speed increases become meaningless. Squashing the range of speeds so they start off between Lvl1 and Lvl2 (slightly faster that your pace) and don't increase nearly as much would placate me.
One thing I forgot to mention in my last post. I was able to get the Advanced Com on my first trip to Gemini before I fought Iron 3. It's apparently possible to do wall jumps without the double jump boots... I accomplished it by jumping and falling into the wall jump position with a tight maneuver at Gemini 3,C and going around the low ceiling thingy there. I think its 3,C. It's a tough jump. Aside from the computer being down after I blew up the computer until I blew up the engine, it doesn't appear to have caused anything to go awry. I couldn't get to the switch to enter Taurus. I was kinda sad about that.
One odd thing I was thinking about was what happens if you just skip getting the Advanced Com. It doesn't look like a required item right now at all. Would the computers suddenly work again after you blow up the Engine? I almost think they will.
Good point. I didn't even think to try that.
Seriously, I think you deserve a special award for some of this persistent and time-consuming bugtesting you've done. I tried for nearly 20 minutes to make that jump up to the Virgo entrance early, and I can't do it. So I just have to take your word on some of these bugged jumps that they're actually possible, heh heh. With this jump, after reading your post, I tried it for about fifteen minutes, and finally managed to make the jump. It's much harder than going up somewhere, since that's relatively easy to set up if you can glitch up a wall to the screen top and then scroll up still inside the wall. Here, you have to keep falling down and quickly react to time your jump right, and most of the time you just end up falling down outside the wall and having to scroll down and back up to try again, which is very time-consuming and patience-trying.
I didn't even think about partially entering a wall by falling into its top corner - which I should have, since I'd noticed it's possible. You can gain the Health upgrade in Pisces 37 without the Grappler simply by dashing/jumping off the block near the bottom on the entrance screen, and timing your jump as you hit the top-right corner of the platform in the next room to bugwalljump off it and up onto the blocks.
I know sometimes you'll do a little hop when your jump brings you to the corner of a block above so you'll jump up on top of it, but that always happens automatically without pressing L again, and I think, intentionally by design. If you don't press L again in the spot I've mentioned, you just slide down the side of the platform slightly inside it.
I suspect that fixing this bug might prove problematic with other intended movement - like how you can make jumps from underneath overhanging tiles by jumping up slightly inside them, which is pretty much required in a number of places - so making it impossible to exploit this bug also might screw up a lot of the level design and require reworking it. It might be better to simply identify where it can be exploited to do serious sequence-breaking, like this Gemini spot, and redesign the affected rooms so that exploiting the bug prevents you from advancing. E.g. for Gemini 2C, perhaps extending the 3x1 pillar down two more tiles, and moving the solo block left and down one row/column, would place it so you can still reach it with a proper double-jump, but out of reach of a walljump. I'm not sure.
I imagine the same thing if you get Silver Arrows before regular Arrows in a standard ZC quest. The Arrows are a lvl 1 item and lvl 1 items can't replace higher level items.
You're correct. I just tested it - warped to Explosive Missile boss and defeated/acquired item. It gives you no extra missiles, so if you don't grab any upgrades, it just gives you a weapon you can select but without ammunition. Gaining Missile Upgrades to it works. Returning to Aquarius and gaining the Missile Launcher just adds 5 missiles to your max; it doesn't replace the Explosive Missiles item.
Actually, making custom enemies is totally doable. That's not much of a limitation at all!
To an extent. From my observations playing 2.5 quests with scripted custom enemies, so far, it doesn't seem like they fully integrate with the TLOZ enemies. E.g., in
Linked To the Past, I noted that the custom enemies would stay dead after killing them the first time, regardless of whether I killed none, some or all of the TLOZ enemies in the dungeon room and returned. So either they don't integrate with that function or the quest author simply didn't know how or bother to integrate them. I wasn't sure if they can be integrated into the clear enemies/trigger secret/reward stuff either. While playing your demo, I wasn't sure whether all the rooms with enemy clear secret triggers/rewards in this quest were purely tile-swapped TLOZ enemies or included some custom scripted enemies... How does that work out?
One of the apparent drawbacks to using the ground-based TLOZ enemies in gravitied rooms seems to be that they have their direction of attack restricted to the horizontal direction - is that imposed by the engine by using gravity, or is that a restriction you put in place, just to prevent them from pointlessly trying to walk up against gravity/down against solid combos?
Could you, for example, script enemies that replace some of the ground-based TLOZ so they are less mindless, and either don't run off the edge of platforms, or are "smart" enough to sense when the drop would remove them from the screen, and not go that direction? Is that something the scripting could pull the necessary info from the room layout? Would you have to, instead, write general code and then draft data maps for each room they appear in to restrict/modify their movements properly? Or would you have to hardcode the restrictions for each enemy type for each different room layout they appear in? I know so little about ZC/ZQ and scripting enemies...
ETA:
Gemini 2C: C-Dawg, pretty sure either of these setups would kill the sequence-break here:

/

I've tested and confirmed that both can be passed with DJBs. I am 99% certain the first one cannot be walljumped past, and I'm 100% certain on the second. You may or may not want to put a block adjacent the single block, on the right side of 2B. Players will likely overshoot it on their first double-jump to it, scrolling the screen left, and if there's no block there in 2B, they'll fall down before they correct and hold right to scroll back onto the block in 2C. Not really a walkability issue if you opt not to add it.
ETA: In case it's not obvious - making the pillar 5 tiles high makes it impassable without DJBs, making it pointless to walljump to the block, if it's even still possible in either layout. You can't jump high enough to partially enter the pillar from the top, so the only way to pass it would be from the bottom. It's too high to bottom row bug jump into, and
probably too low to jump into from on top of or the side of the left block.
Maybe you could jump into the lower-left corner of it from a walljump from the right... but probably not. The second layout makes that less likely than the first.
Edited by newstarshipsmell, 07 February 2015 - 09:17 PM.